Disaster is still better than AI

Geoffrey Hinton, who won the Nobel prize in physics for research in neural networks, recently talked to The Guardian newspaper. From the article:One of the “godfathers of AI”, Geoffrey Hinton, has said it could turn out that humans would have been better off never developing the technology as he warned it could trigger a large-scale incident this year or next, such as a temporary blackout of financial or power systems.Of course, like typical mainstream media, this article basically says “there’s a risk, tech CEOs are irresponsible, Trump is irresponsible, and we need regulation.”But anyway, let’s explore Dr. Hinton’s worry that AI could bring down the electrical grid or cause a financial meltdown. Although that would suck in some ways, it would likely be the least horrible of all things that could happen.Indeed, what sounds far worse to me is that AI keeps on evolving and getting more powerful, and nothing obviously bad happens. Because then, we’re just going to be locked into a world where everything is AI, immense amounts of energy is wasted, intellectual communities are destroyed, and eventually nature is obliterated because technology pushes it out of the way.Immense amounts of energy is wasted powering AI, which is harming our beautiful biosphere. Photo © Jason PolakIn other words, if we don’t experience some immediate pain from AI, we’re just going to blindly accept it and become totally addicted to it.Unfortunately, that’s the only thing human beings will respond to: immediate pain. That’s the only reason why people don’t want to give up AI: because it’s integrated into our financial system right now and integrated into our lives right now, and giving it up would be a more immediate discomfort than the long-term consequences. But if AI brought a serious financial collapse, that would outweigh anything else and we’d give it up.This is one reason why I don’t support ethical AI or AI-safety initiatives. Indeed, such initiatives just offset relatively small dangers from AI so that it can get its claws more deeply into human beings until it’s impossible to remove even when the threat is great. Plus of course, because the very nature of AI is to automate creativity, there’s no such thing as ethical AI.I bet you have a strong instinct to avoid hot surfaces, and that instinct has protected you from burning yourself many times. But did you develop this instinct by reading some sign that said “don’t touch hot surfaces”? Is it because your mother told you to avoid them? Nope. You burnt yourself and now you sure as heck don’t want to put your hand in the fire.Human beings need to burn themselves, and burn themselves sufficiently badly so that they understand how horrible this technology is.You know, a lot of people are talking about how math is suffering from AI. There’s a bit of a crisis and polarization in math about AI, as I’ve written about before. But even in this domain, I think it would be better to have a ‘disaster’.More precisely, it would be better if academic mathematics were obliterated and all funding to math were cut off. For even before AI, academic mathematics turned itself into an industry of proving theorems rather than a healthy community of using logical reasoning to do good in the world. This was the wrong direction even before AI, and now AI is just exposing the rotten core of academic mathematics for everyone to see.So if modern mathematical research were completely destroyed by AI, then people would also have to rebuild math and do something new and more human-centric.And that’s the key: rebuilding. See, what I’m pretty sure about is that human beings are a lot more resilient and ingenious than we give ourselves credit for, especially when the need calls for it. And what I think is that if we did experience some kind of financial ‘disaster’, things actually wouldn’t be as bad as the mainstream media would like us to believe.But everyone has a vested interested in making a disaster sound as bad as possible. Tech CEOs like potential disasters to sound bad because it fuels the interest (whether good or bad) in their inventions. The media (e.g. The Guardian) likes to put a negative, scary spin on potential disasters because it gets more people reading, subscribing, and/or viewing ads.And the elites and the rich don’t want you to start thinking that we could easily recover from a ‘disaster’. Because if that were true, then their entire empire would be at risk. They like manufacturing fear, and the technological system itself manufactures fear as an adaptive mechanism as fear itself is profitable.So, it’s counterintuitive to say this, but if AI really messed up the financial system or attacked our food supply chain, then we’d likely be a lot better off than otherwise. Just imagine how quickly the general population would demand blood and the shutting down of datacenters and tech companies. Think of how much nicer the world would be without AI.If you want to support my work, consider a paid subscription even though my articles will always be free:And of course, no AI was used to write this article. None whatsoever.No posts